Medicine

Event 14

The John Maddox Lecture - The Drugs Don't Work

Join us online: Saturday 23 May 2020, 5.30pm – 6.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Baillie Gifford Digital Stage

Antibiotics add, on average, twenty years to our lives. For over seventy years, since the manufacture of penicillin in 1943, we have survived extraordinary operations and life-threatening infections. We are so familiar with these wonder drugs that we take them for granted. The truth is that we have been abusing them: as patients, as doctors, as travellers, in our food. No new class of antibacterial has been discovered for twenty six years and the bugs are fighting back. If we do not take responsibility now, in a few decades we may start dying from the most commonplace of operations and ailments that can today be treated easily.

Professor Dame Sally C. Davies was the Chief Medical Officer for England and the first woman to hold the post. She holds a number of international advisory positions and is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Introduced by Magdalena Skipper, Editor in Chief of Nature.

Event 39

The Covid-19 Pandemic

Join us online: Tuesday 26 May 2020, 11.30am – 12.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

An exacting analysis of the responses to the covid-19 pandemic from one of the world's most respected experts. Professor Sridhar is chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author with Chelsea Clinton of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? Chaired by Daniel Davis.

Event 41

Immunity & covid-19

Join us online: Tuesday 26 May 2020, 2.30pm – 3.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

The immune system holds the key to human health, and is perhaps the greatest asset we have in dealing with the coronavirus. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Professor Daniel Davis describes the scientific quest to understand how it works – and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age and our state of mind. He explains how this knowledge is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being, and what we are discovering about our natural ability to cope with the covid-19 pandemic.

Vaccination - Future of Global Health

Join us online: Wednesday 27 May 2020, 11.30am BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

Four exceptional innovators in the field of vaccination introduce their work on some of the world's biggest medical challenges, and discuss the scope and scale of vaccine development and its importance for global health.

Dr Julia Fan Li is CEO of Micrographia Bio, a London-based venture backed company working at the intersection of software and biology. Our proprietary technology mines multidimensional data acquired during pharmaceutical research. Whereas traditional drug discovery asks the question: “which of these million molecules can cure this specific disease?” We ask the opposite question: "given this specific chemical compound, which disease is it best suited to cure?". By mapping each chemical to its true activity, we are engineering the chemical atlas for modern drug discovery. If Micrographia had existed 12 months ago, we would have a potential therapeutic candidate for COVID-19 in real time.

Samir Ali Khan [2007 - https://www.gatescambridge.org/members-area/connect/directory/scholar/6082] did his PhD in Pharmacology. Co-founder of Lighthouse Innovations: an Oxford-based innovation and access strategy house advising health start-ups and entrepreneurs on market access, pricing and payer value strategy within and beyond the NHS in the UK. Samir has previously advised top 10 FTSE global life sciences and healthcare companies and >50 start-ups on market access strategy for drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and AI. He is also a co-inventor of a vaccine candidate for Hepatitis E in India and drug targets in neurological and cardiovascular diseases in the UK.

Emma Glennon is an infectious disease epidemiologist who examines why new diseases emerge, working at the intersections of ecology, data science, and the social and economic determinants of disease. She is interested in how technology in an unequal world can counteract or contribute to the spread of disease. She has worked on epidemiological research and outbreak response around the world, including in the UK, India, Australia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Dan Storisteanu is a co-founder of Simprints, where he focuses on research, testing, and deployment of a biometric system for global health applications. In his work with another Cambridge start-up, DIOSynVax, Dan supports efforts to develop Ebola, influenza, and Covid vaccines. He is a Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.

Dan Davis is Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester and author of The Beautiful Cure.

Event 52

The Art of Statistics

Join us online: Wednesday 27 May 2020, 6.30pm – 7.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Baillie Gifford Digital Stage

Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science.

Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way statistical claims can be sensationalised, particularly in the media. In the age of big data, as data science becomes established as a discipline, a basic grasp of statistical literacy is more important than ever.

In The Art of Statistics, David Spiegelhalter guides the reader through the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Drawing on real world problems to introduce conceptual issues, he shows us how statistics can help us determine the luckiest passenger on the Titanic, whether serial killer Harold Shipman could have been caught earlier, and if screening for ovarian cancer is beneficial. Chaired by Rosie Boycott.

'Shines a light on how we can use the ever-growing deluge of data to improve our understanding of the world' – Nature.

33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

Join us online: Thursday 28 May 2020, 11.30am – 12.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

What is a good death? How would you choose to live your last few months? How do we best care for the rising tide of very elderly?

In a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. And he writes about all the conversations that we, our parents, our children, the medical community, our government and society as a whole should be having.

Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. And it is a call to arms for us to make radical changes to our perspective on ‘the seventh age of man’.

Event 56

Technologies of the Human Corpse

Join us online: Thursday 28 May 2020, 1pm – 1.45pm BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

Troyer explains how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms. John Troyer is Director of the Centre for Death and Society and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. He grew up in the American funeral industry.

Event 59

The Art of Rest

Join us online: Thursday 28 May 2020, 5.30pm – 6.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Baillie Gifford Digital Stage

The Art of Rest draws on ground-breaking research Claudia Hammond collaborated on - 'The Rest Test' - the largest global survey into rest ever undertaken. It was completed by 18,000 people across 135 different countries. Much of value has been written about sleep, but rest is different; it is how we unwind, calm our minds and recharge our bodies. And, as the survey revealed, how much rest you get is directly linked to your sense of well-being.

Claudia Hammond is an award-winning writer and broadcaster and Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex. As the presenter of All in the Mind she is BBC Radio 4's voice of psychology and mental health.

The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World

Join us online: Friday 29 May 2020, 7.30pm – 8.15pm BST

Virtual venue: Llwyfan Cymru Digidol – Wales Digital Stage

Smart new technologies. Longer, healthier lives. Human progress has risen to great heights, but at the same time it has prompted anxiety about where we’re heading. Are our jobs under threat? If we live to 100, will we ever really stop working? And how will this change the way we love, manage and learn from others?

Andrew J Scott is Professor of Economics at the London Business School and consulting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Longevity. Through his multi-award-winning research, writing and teaching, his ideas inform a global understanding of the profound shifts reshaping our world and the actions needed for us to flourish individually and as a society.

Lynda Gratton is Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School where she teaches an elective on the Future of Work and directs an executive program on Human Resource Strategy. Lynda is a fellow of the World Economic Forum, is ranked by Business Thinkers in the top 15 in the world, and was named the best teacher at London Business School in 2015.